I have three computers networked, one XP Pro, One XP Home and one 98se. I'm using TCP/IP connecting through a Netgear hub and everthing works fine for awhile so it appears to be set up properly. I have an external modem on the XP Pro machine and am using connection sharing so the other machines have internet access through the XP Pro machine. After a period of time transfering files to or from or through the XP Pro computer, the network connection dies. It cannot connect to the other two and they cannot connect to it. The others can connect to each other just fine. The only solution seems to be to restart the XP Pro machine. This can happen when downloading files to either the 98 machine or the XP Home machine, or when transferring files from the hard drives of either machine to or from the XP Pro machine. I have checked the amount of bytes transferred and there does not seem to be a set number that initiates the problem. If I am constantly downloading from the internet as is often the case, the problem will occur about once a day. When the connection dies, the connection status shows that it is working and connected, but attempting to access another computer results in "network path not found". I have the XP firewall enabled on the dial-up connection on the XP Pro machine, but it is not enabled on the LAN connection. The win 98 machine has no firewall. Not sure of the firewall status on the XP Home machine. It is installed and enabled on the dial-up connection (It has a modem and connection set-up, but I have it basically disabled so everything uses the shared connection) but not sure on the network. Most of the network traffic is between the XP Pro and 98 machines. The XP Pro machine has a Linksys NC100 nic, and I've wondered if this card or driver may be the problem? There is apparently no XP driver available from Linksys, so the only choice is the one that comes with XP. If I go to the Linksys site, and enter the proper information, it leads me to download a driver that would seem to be for XP, but once you open the file, there is nothing indicating it's for XP and XP will not update the driver using that file. Can anyone reccomend a good PCI card for XP Pro? Thanks!

Are you able to find 2000 drivers for the Linksys card? If so use them. Have you checked your ethernet cable to the xp machine? I use D-Link cards for my xp pro machines and they work just fine.

Thanks for the reply! I got some new cables yesterday and I also plugged the XP Pro machine into a different port on the hub. Didn't help. I died today after tranferring less tha 4MB. The driver I downloaded is for win2k, so I'll try that. I think I have a D-Link card here somewhere, too. Which model do you use?

Well, I tried moving some files, and was able to move 167 MB before it failed. So i tried installing the win2k driver as suggested. BIG mistake! After about a miniute of copying files the winXP Pro machine locked up completely.

I had the same touble for me. My network would go down after random periods of time while i was on the internet. I have ADSL. I searched the web and found alot of people seem the have their network die in WinXP, but all the solutions i read never worked for me. For me its happened twice the first time did the final step of a reformat. This time i didn't want to do that again. When my network crashed i noticed the lan was still sending data. Which i found strange considering i couldn't ping anything on the network. In the end i decided to see what processes was doing what. The only thing using my CPU was sqlserver (in this case MSDE 2000), after stopping the service, i could reconnect to the internet and see the rest of myt network. Thinking back to when the first time it happened to me, i was then just starting to run SQLServer 2000, so i probably had the same problem then too. If you are running SQLServer or MSDE then this may be your problem. I hope it helps, Matt